Review: A DEAD BODY IN TAOS, Wilton's Music Hall

David Farr made his name in 2016 bringing John le Carré's book The Night Manager to vivid life in a hit TV adaptation. In his latest play A Dead Body In Taos, re-animation is again the name of the game.

Sam Horvath (Gemma Lawrence) has arrived in Taos, New Mexico to ID the corpse of her mother Kath (Eve Ponsonby). She may be physically dead but - as Sam soon finds out - her mother has not quite yet departed this world. Before dying, Kath uploaded her memories into an android and, in this new body, wants to build a relationship with the daughter she abandoned a decade ago. Sam desperately wants to move on from Kath and, with the power of attorney over the money necessary to keep android-mum "alive", has to decide whether her mother's will is the only thing she executes before she returns to London.

Farr throws up moral and ethical conundrums aplenty. Is it fair to spend your only child's inheritance on extending your own life? Should children be the arbiters of their parents' happiness? And who ultimately should decide who lives and who dies?

By going back in time to Kath's past, Farr also provides deep context to this troubled woman's final decisions. We first meet her as a teenager in the 1960s running away from home and her family and faking her way onto a course at Kent State University, Ohio. There she meets and falls for Leo Brewer (David Burnett), a politics major who pulls the budding artist into his orbit. It's not long before Kath has taken the lead and is organising anti-Vietnam protests; one of these leads to the infamous Kent State shootings of 1970 when four students were shot dead by National Guard soldiers.

In the aftermath, Kath breaks up with Leo, moves to London and starts afresh. Her punk attitude and artistic skills are used by her new lover to kickstart an advertising firm. Thereafter, marriage and Sam come along before divorce and a return to the US but, through it all, Kath never forgets Leo. In examining the relationships between Kath, Leo and Sam, Farr holds up to the light the power and the price of love. The last scene sees the three of them in a moving group hug that underlines their strong connections and how far each of them have come since Kath's physical death.

Aesthetically, there is little to write home about. The almost-bare stage has only one major prop; a large wooden frame to one side of the stage through which android-Kath monotones her conversations to her daughter. The one visual aspect which raises an eyebrow is the projected transcriptions on the back wall.

In an era where, more often than not, the culture we consume comes with subtitles, this is something that more productions should consider in order to make shows more accessible to the hard of hearing and those who grasp written English more than the spoken variety (my parents included); the alternative trialled by some shows like Groove is to have captions available through your mobile but, handy as this is, the lit phone screen could be distracting to and misinterpreted by other members of the audience.

A Dead Body In Taos uses a very wellworn trope in a light-touch sci-fi framing to expound on the ethical themes and, between the backstory and the present-day interactions leaves everyone but Kath feeling a tad underwritten. There is frankly too little emotional depth here to engender any real empathy for any of the characters and we feel as much (maybe more) for Sam's lawyer who lost his wife to a car-crash as we do for the central trio who have been tortured by their relative losses for decades. Even at the death (pun intended), when we find out that Kath doesn't intend to spend eternity entirely alone, isn't as heart-stopping as it should be.

Ponsonby is highly engaging as the firebrand Kath, the angry woman who begets a possibly even angrier woman in Sam. She effortlessly moves from her younger brasher self to her roboticly voiced form with ease and plausibility and convincingly explores her character's ethically dubious actions. For her part, Lawrence's portrayal of Sam as the heavy drinker weighed down by the heavier toll of her mother's actions is well-acted even if Farr skimps on her backstory.

A Dead Body In Taos is a challenging work that gives us plenty to ponder. The broad historical panorama drawn by Farr would perhaps be better served by a more expansive art form like TV. Those unaware of the Kent State shootings - arguably akin in epochal terms to the poll tax riots here, South Africa's Sharpeville massacre or the Tiananmen Square protests in China - will not appreciate the social and political impact that Farr references, an impact which may yet be felt by Vladimir Putin's Russia after his draft for the war in Ukraine.

Perhaps, through the kind of revolutionary technology shown in this play, Farr feels that a new epoch for humanity is on its way.

A Dead Body In Taos continues at Wilton's Music Hall until 12 November.

Photo Credit: Tristram Kenton

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